Recently in rant Category

I got back from Rome earlier this afternoon. If I could find the cable for my camera I'd upload photos, but failing that I'll use a card reader to pull them off it ...

Rome was fantastic, so now I have to get geared up for Sydney ..

On the phone side ...

I'm currently using a backup phone, but can't use my E71!!

Why?

Because Three still haven't given us the unlock codes!!!

So not only did they manage to disconnect me from the world last week (and seemingly they didn't "allow" several or our numbers to be ported, so some of my staff were left in "limbo") but now I can't even use my phone!

Three win the prize for most inept and useless company I've dealt with ever. Seriously.

If you want to get a mobile phone DO NOT use these jokers!

I am currently incommunicado courtesy of Three's "wonderful" customer service.

I'm not going to get in to all the "goings on" surrounding our experience with Three, but suffice to say we decided to switch back to Vodafone.

That switch is not complete and won't be for another few hours ...

In the meantime the "lovely" people at Three decided to cut us off...

They're also demanding we pay them to unlock phones etc., so I'm basically cut off

If anyone needs to contact me urgently - you're out of luck!

If it's not too urgent email me and hopefully I'll be able to get back to you ...

Talk about annoying!

Dear Three - you really really suck!

I'm heading over to Rome next week to attend a friend's wedding, but being a small bit disorganised I only got round to organising the trip in the last couple of days.

Rome is the capital of Italy. Dublin is the capital of Ireland. You would think that in 2009 the cost of getting between two capital cities wouldn't be horrendous and that you'd have a reasonable number of "sane" options open to you.

Unfortunately that isn't really the case, so I've ended up extending my trip to Rome in order to justify it. There's no point going to one of the most important cities in Europe if you're not going to get a chance to see anything and Irish wedding aren't exactly renowned for being "dry" affairs!

So timetable wise ...

There are several airlines that handle the route from Dublin to Rome. Unless you want to take a rather circuitous route, that won't actually save you much money, your options are a bit limited. It's basically down to Ryanair and Aer Lingus. The other airlines, such as Alitalia, Air France, KLM and Swissair aren't really viable (I don't really fancy being stuck in Zurich for four hours!)

So I opted for Aer Lingus.

Flight price, including taxes supposedly saved me 13.50 (not sure where they got that figure from). However it actually cost me a lot more ...

The charming little stealth charges kick in...

First off there's an extra 30 euro to check a bag. So unless you're only flying with a carry on bag that 13.50 saving is already gone...

Now I don't know about you, but I would have thought that a plane ticket gave me the right to sit down for the duration of the flight. Seemingly not .. When you go to choose your seat you're then hit with another charge - 5 euro each way!

So I pay an extra 40 euro for the ability to carry clean clothes and sit down?

Presumably I've also been charged extra for credit card fees as well...

And if you don't pay attention they'll also charge you for travel insurance that you never asked for as well!

Lovely!

PS: Seemingly you can avoid the seating fee if you don't choose your seat during booking, but that's not made clear at all

At some time in the last couple of months an Irish website got hacked and its member database was stolen. The database contained email addresses and the associated passwords to login to the website.

The list of email addresses and these passwords was published on a website which has since been taken offline (though you could find it in Google's cache as recently as 48 hours ago).

While some of the email addresses and password combinations could give you access to a lot of things this would only happen where the person used the same password for everything.

The list was NOT a list of email account passwords ie. if you could actually use the password to access the person's email account it was purely coincidental.

How do I know this?

My email address is on the list, as I was informed by someone a couple of days ago.

Though even the person who informed me was doubtful that I'd have opted for such a stupidly weak password for something as important as my email. They'd be right. I hadn't! I had used a weak password on several websites - in some cases semi-intentionally

Unfortunately some people seem to like scaring people and also have zero respect for privacy and zero understanding of security or anything else, so you'll find the list of email addresses published on at least one Irish website. (I'm not going to link to them, since they don't deserve a link if they're going to be that careless with other people's data, but I do hope that someone flags their idiocy with the data privacy people)

On the plus side, hopefully some people will realise that having a password policy wouldn't be such a bad idea after all ....

I have odd ideas during the middle of the night...

The other night while chatting with a couple of people about social media "experts" and other snake oil types I went checking domains ... SocialMediaExpert.ie was available (as were a few other extensions), so I grabbed it.

James from Forbairt Media did a wonderful job on the design and layout (if you don't like it blame my taste, not his skills!)

And the first couple of posts went up yesterday.

What's it all about?

My first post explains some of it

The BBC have a serious online presence which probably costs them a fortune to maintain every year.

None of the Irish political parties have an online presence that comes anywhere near it (and you wouldn't really expect them to either... )

But when an Irish political party blatantly rips off the BBC's design and thinks they can get away with it, what kind of message does that send?

They then try to cover their tracks, but obviously don't do a particularly convincing job of it.

Now the thing that leaves me practically speechless is the attitude of the politicos that emanates from their comments on both of Steph's posts:

Get over it Steph. The site is brilliant. Its really is superb. Its online, it works, and its not going anywhere.

As a matter of fact, the site online now, was ready to go last week, the .org site up yesterday was a bit of a teaser based on some very early work.

I think its great. Don't think anybody else other than yourself and Dave Cochrane of p.ie are even the slightest bit bothered. My two cents, appreciate a brilliant website when you see it!

So the message is what exactly?

(Irish) Political parties don't have to abide by copyright rules?

As I already learnt, they seem to think that they can abuse email without any censure, so why would design or any other intellectual property matter?

Of course the funny thing is that they don't do a particulary good job of protecting their own IP.

Both finegael.tel and fiannafail.tel are registered to the same person.. I somehow doubt if that person has any links to either party and most certainly not both ...

I send and receive a lot of email (I've mentioned this more than once in the past).

In order for an email to catch my attention it needs to be engaging at some level. It doesn't need to be an artistic masterpiece, but something clear and engaging.

Yet again today I got an email which was the exact opposite of this...

To start with the subject line was a disaster. Starting the subject line with a colon looks odd and when you couple that with a total disregard for proper capitalisation it springs out at me for all the wrong reasons.

What about the content?

Weird coloured text doesn't add anything.

As for the content... a totally uninspiring mish-mash of buzzwords that doesn't even read like coherent English.

Now if they'd actually taken  few minutes to read over the email before they hit send then maybe they'd have realise the error of their ways...

Well maybe they wouldn't have ...

If you're going to send out a mass email check before you send it.

I'm an individual - maybe you can't do a proper personalised email to ME, but sending to "colleagues" is just silly. If you want me to feel like a number, then you've won. Thanks. You've just made my Monday!

If you want to run your own business then you need to work at it.

You cannot expect your business to run itself.

You cannot expect to work "normal" hours.

You cannot expect to work a "normal" working week

If you can't deal with any of the above then simply give up now.

Sure, everyone needs to strike the balance between work and their private life

However, if you're running your own business you need to realise that you cannot think like an employee (conversely your employees won't think like you do either, but that's another discussion)

Remember Bido spamming people on DNForum?

Well they've also decided it would be a "good idea" to spam bloggers asking for a review.

*sigh*

I get a lot of email to both my personal and work email addresses every single day, so sometimes I don't spot an email immediately. Since it's a Saturday I decided I'd go back over some of the less important emails I'd received over the last couple of days when I came across this really stupid email from Bido:

My name is Andrew Laskaris with Bido.com - the one-domain-per-day Social Auction Platform. I'd like to take a moment to let you know that Bido is back!  We took a technical hiatus for the past few months to rebuild our architecture, and we're finally returning auctions with a big splash.  I'd like to get you to visit our site and perhaps post a review on your blog about our Social Auction service.

Check out our site of course, but here are some pointers about Bido to get you started:
Mainly we are trying to relay the image to people that we are a Social Auction platform, so that should certainly get a mention. More on this later.
We also feature Trackbacks so we give incentive for bloggers to link to us, as we will give a permanent link back.
We're also happy to announce that we will be soon opening the Bido platform to extend beyond domain names, it's a Social Auction platform that can be used in almost any industry, such as classic cars for example. More on this later.
Expert Members get many benefits of participation, details below, along with some more info and strong points of Bido to help you understand what we do, who we are, the vision, how the site works, etc.

Bido was founded on the principal that the domain name industry needs change and we expect the revolutionary means in which auctions are conducted online will contribute to this change.

Bido.com is focused on auctions in the domain name industry.  Domains names are equivalent to online real estate, and getting a good name these days is hard.  A number of companies have sprung up with made-up names or unique names that leave out vowels, such as flickr.com.  This is because they cannot register regular domains as they have all been gobbled up long ago. 

Bido.com focuses on one good domain name a day, so people both within the domain name industry and outside the domain name industry have a chance to acquire great domains at fair market value via our auction.

The one domain a day auction allows a lot of people to focus on the value of one domain, instead of having to search through thousands of domain listings to find a domain they may or may not want.

We pick one domain from thousands of submissions we receive on a weekly basis.  We write a description about the domain's potential uses, find videos that correspond with that domain to try to visualize our description, and then we market the domain the domain around to our contacts, partners, and end-users identified as possessing an interest in the domain at hand.  The auction lasts one hour and starts at 1:00PM EST. The starting price is always $1.00.

Members submit domains with no reserve and let the market determine the final selling price, while the Bido team ensures the technology and brand are there to ensure the maximum sale price that the market will bear.

The type of format we use for auctions is unique, as is the platform and technology we use to push the domain names up for auction.

We have built our own, proprietary "push technology." The technology allows us to push all of the bidding prices, the bidding history, high bidder status, and other information directly to the user - without requiring the user to refresh his Web page. All information is updated in real time and no action is needed from the user - as far as domain auctions go, this is completely unique.

Bido uses trackbacks so if you link to an auction, we will detect it and send a linkback from our trackback system. Each linkback is admin-approved, so if you don't see it right away, give it a little bit of time for Bido to review the link and approve the linkback. The linkback will appear just above the array of Expert Commentaries.
This is an incentive for bloggers to get benefits from participating. The linkback is a reciprocal link from the Bido.com site and will help the blog gain more weight in the search engines.

Being an expert member helps the person to build their brand, market their name, gain exposure and recognition in the industry.
Who are Bido.com Experts:

    * Direct navigation experts
    * Domain name development experts
    * Domain name investors
    * Search engine optimization experts
    * Brand managers
    * Marketing executives
    * And some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the business world today.

Benefits of being an Expert Member:

    * Expert reviews on Bido.com will be viewed by thousands of people everyday providing increased recognition for yourself and your company.
    * Being featured on one of the most popular domain name auction websites in the world will increase your credibility and standing in the domain community.
    * Bido.com will keep a history of every auction so you can refer to your comments for years to come. Search engines will also index your comments further strengthening your web presence.
    * Your profile will give users the ability to communicate with you directly and allow you to highlight your personal and professional interests. In exchange for contributing your time and domain knowledge, Bido.com will help you connect with new clients and build your own business.

The Bido platform is much more than domain name auctions, however.
Soon we will open the Bido platform and let other people operate their own auction channel.
The Social Auction Platform can be used in a plethora of industries.

So these are some key points about Bido, to give you an overview of the platform. In your review, if you would like to link to a specific auction URL, we will approve a link back to your blog. It takes approximately an hour for that link on our site to go live.

Your readers will certainly applaud you for identifying Bido as a site of interest to them.

Also, we have a Facebook group we would like you to join:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=51023537523
We have a LinkedIn group as well:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1171027
And if you would like to follow us on Twitter, this is our profile link:
http://twitter.com/bidodotcom

We can expand upon this later if you need additional information. Feel free to give me a call at 800-611-Bido if you have any questions and you would like to speak with me. Thanks for your attention and I look forward to reading and hearing your thoughts. Please send me a link to your blog post should you decide to do a writeup on us. 

Best regards,
Andrew Laskaris
www.Bido.com               

Idiots!
Why do I get the distinct impression that the Bido spammers are not going to stop spamming any time soon?

So now the question is whether I should email the spammers to give them links to my blog posts about them, or if they have any semblance of a clue (doubtful, admittedly) maybe I'll just wait until they find them by themselves ...

Trying to get sites to display identically across multiple browsers and multiple operating systems is awkward. This site probably doesn't display particularly well on all browsers, but I'm not a professional web designer / developer, so you'll have to excuse me. It's also not a corporate / business website trying to sell products or services to the public.

Screenclick, however, is a business website.

Earlier this evening I decided to visit it on my Mac using Firefox. Apart from the really annoying splash page, which doesn't do anything useful, the main page does not load correctly in Firefox 3 on the Mac:


Now if you open the same page in Safari you seem something totally different:
Why?

Seemingly somebody decided to use Microsoft's Silverlight, but didn't bother to do a simple plugin check that would either prompt the user to install the plugin or gracefully degrade.

I won't be able to view their site on my Linux desktop either, as Silverlight isn't available for Linux (there is a port, but last time I checked there wasn't a native Debian / Ubuntu version available)

UPDATE: I've now moved to my Ubuntu Linux desktop and this is what I get:

The wonderfully helpful splash page (do they honestly expect me to continue browsing after seeing that?)



and the inner page (for some odd reason it's actually telling me that I need Silverlight now, whereas it wasn't on my Mac!)